It’s springtime in New Hampshire and that can mean a lot of different things.
Sometimes spring means beautiful, balmy days. Other times it means a foot of slushy snow on April Fool’s Day. Sometimes it means baseball and soccer in March. Other times it means skiing in April or May.
But if there’s one thing we all take for granted about springtime in New Hampshire, it is that the sap will run in the sugar maple trees and we will enjoy another vintage of the finest maple syrup.
For me, it’s personal: I was born with a maple teaspoon in my mouth. On our old family farm in the White Mountains, my dad and uncles used to harvest the sap in buckets and boil enough maple syrup to smother the oatmeal and pancakes all year long. Entering a sugar shack when the evaporators were steaming and the walls and ceiling were caked with a sugary mist was a sweet sensation. When I later used that syrup to woo my South African wife and bring her home to New Hampshire, the effect was sweeter still.
In those early days, it took around 35 gallons of sap to boil one gallon of Grade A medium amber maple syrup. On a fine day in March when the weather topped 40 degrees and the nights were still below freezing, the sap would practically pour out of the taps in the side of the sugar maple tree, already sweet to the taste. If you couldn’t wait to boil it down into syrup, you took a swig on the spot or made it into coffee or tea.
That was then. Nowadays, New Hampshire’s famous maple tree and its precious sap are sadly in decline – because of us.
Decades after scientists began to sound the alarm about CO2 pollution and resulting climate change, warming winter temperatures are moving maple season forward by more than a week and contributing to a significant drop in the sweetness of sap, the sole ingredient in maple syrup.
According to National Geographic, the sugar content of sap in northeastern maple trees has fallen by 50 percent in the last 50 years, raising the cost of production and diminishing syrup supplies. Where it once took 25 gallons of sap (before my time) to produce a gallon of syrup with the requisite 66.9 percent sugar concentration, now 50 gallons are generally needed.
That’s because maple trees require a specialized climate of several weeks of freezing nights and mild days to produce their sap – a climate that can no longer be counted on in New Hampshire. The sap, in turn, enables the trees to grow and protect themselves from insects, disease and drought. The less sugar they produce, the less healthy they become and the less sap they have left over for maple syrup.
As the climatic band supporting maple trees moves north due to global warming, the production of maple syrup moves with it. Fifty years ago, the United States supplied nearly 80 percent of the world’s maple syrup and Canada the remaining 20 percent; now, that ratio is reversed.
In New Hampshire, the trend is even more pronounced. In 2016, maple syrup production fell to just 169,000 gallons, one of its lowest amounts on record and a far cry from the 4.2 million gallons of peak production in the late 1880s when my great-great-grandad worked the farm.
What’s more, a rise in the number of days above freezing in winter and early spring, like the thaws we experienced this year, raises the risk to sugar maples of defoliating pests like the forest tent caterpillar. It also diminishes the brilliance of New Hampshire’s fall foliage, another staple of our state.
Modern maple farmers like my high school friend Ben Fisk in Temple are working hard to keep the industry afloat by embracing recent advancements in the collection and evaporation of sap, and delivering a panoply of inventive maple products to markets far and wide. Their efforts do more than satisfy the pallet: They generate an estimated $150 million in economic activity for New Hampshire every year and put some 1,000 Granite Staters to work. But they alone cannot prevent the warming of our climate that threatens one of our oldest and sweetest traditions. That job falls on all of us.
The challenge of transitioning our economy off of carbon-emitting fossil fuels to clean renewable energy is urgent and immense. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire tell us that if the current rate of fossil fuel consumption continues unabated, average temperatures in New Hampshire will rise by 9.5 degrees before century’s end, effectively ending the maple sugaring industry and costing our state hundreds of billions of dollars in lost business and tourism, public health costs, and property damage associated with coastal flooding and other extreme weather events.
Fortunately, energy efficiency and clean power technologies are readily available to fight climate change – and they needn’t break the bank. By weatherizing your home, switching to LED light bulbs and replacing the oil or gas furnace with high-efficiency heat pumps, a typical Granite State family could save more than $2,000 and 4.5 tons of CO2 emissions a year. Add solar panels to your rooftop and you could take your annual savings to $3,000 and 9 tons of CO2 a year, with enough power left over to boil the sap.
Now that’s something worth toasting with a shot of maple syrup this spring.
(Daniel Weeks is a director at ReVision Energy, a local B Corp working to accelerate New England’s clean energy transition.)